Edited by

Sarah Dowling

Amy De'Ath

Poems by Amy De'Ath

For a year of my undergraduate degree I studied in Philadelphia and also spent time in New York, where I first encountered some of the work that has since become important to me — and in fact partly accounts for my recent move to Vancouver in the Pacific Northwest.

The poetry I love most — that I most want to write — is that which erupts from lived experience and is capable of spontaneity, ‘un-knowledge’ in freefall, happy accidents which show me ‘I’ am not who I thought ‘I’ was — and so allow me to step outside of myself. Alice Notley’s sonnets, H.D.’s Sea Garden, or Joseph Ceravolo’s Spring in this World of Poor Mutts offer a kind of expansion, play, pleasure in language that give way to a messiness and ecstasy sometimes lost in other modes of (dialectical, linear, or perhaps deliberately programmatic) thought.

Partly because feminism has been a prevalent discourse among North American (especially Canadian) poetry conversations, I’ve found the writing happening on the other side of the Atlantic to be a lifeline and springboard for my own work. To borrow a phrase from Rachel Blau DuPlessis, I don’t feel the need to ‘invent a new and total culture’ that a previous generation felt: in poetry that’s been done for me, by Lyn Hejinian, Joan Retallack, Susan Howe, and others. Perhaps the space those poets have cleared means there is no need to fall abjectly into the category of the ‘feminine other’ anymore (though I do think women poets in the UK continue to suffer from a lack of serious critical attention paid to their work relative to their male counterparts).

At the same time I’m stuck on how poetic language is constantly and ever more inventively appropriated by popular (digital) culture — how can I begin to write my love poem when Hipster Runoff and Vice magazine have already eaten it? The point is that I can begin, though. And there is so much North American poetry to turn to in thinking about this, especially recent work by Kevin Davies, Lisa Robertson, Catriona Strang, Brian Stefans, Stephen Collis, Cathy Wagner. “Give me hackneyed words because they are good,” says Robertson, and her books — especially The Men, Magenta Soul Whip, and Debbie — have helped me to see how I might disregard or circumvent the limits of the conventional or depleted lyric in my efforts to be sincere. Similarly, while Davies’s work enacts the malaise and social logic of late capitalism, it works through a funny, affective, and subtle irony that affirms the presence of an individual and collective conscience which is at once politicized and self-reflexive. I’m interested in the work these rhetorical affects can do, how the kinds of pleasure and sincerity — perhaps the excess — I want from poetry can be transformative, a form of affective politics.

In Case of Sleep

Sitting on a retro toilet that once belonged to Geena DavisI stand for what I pee. A mighty maze speaks Olivia

through its annals & look! Her apology implodes.I came to see you to tell you that the weather is finally listening

when your chest bleats into the cul-de-sac, but dining into the humanspecies and their revolving loopholes all I hear is your blood

and see it flooding out on a doubly romantic dream of mine whichthe poets say is beautiful but is really glamorous and tiring.

Sleeping with my childhood wardrobe in a garden centreresponsibly and respectfully sharing my angst with the lobelia

I might recline like a cat but I wouldn’t sell my wares openlyI wouldn’t want to be that memory-cat with the power to die the power

to be put back on my feet I came to see you’d been eaten by tar sands

and cat didn’t exist what kind of a country is this

what did you say I missed that

I miss that cat

Just Handcuff Me

Then paint me the sum of polygamy.Tender brawny snippets, pear pips& a drainpipe running down to thesea. Not you not me.

With night you come stomping,It’s kristallnacht in my dream —why did you shave our heads?When will we reinvent love?

Some worlds still purr aparta fly or fact or loafsome people are just called bodiesbut I’d rather die clean on the spot!

Some feel a baby kicking.Asterisk nipples the real SeptemberI began and where I started. Withshining intuition. Esoteric holler.

Hallucination

Pin on your hopeless dreamblu-ray flash bird now I see devotionmapping through a soft-topthen I am watching the blue leaf turning blue.Then I am Piccolo Mondo, killer of joy boysand the third wave and I have beena long time coming in the ovens.

The foothills are fleshing out, obituariesare turning the corner of the streetto meet you dissipated and tuck the corner ofthe sheet among your family maybe washyour house down at dawn, maybe make a genius snowmanlet it float towards the future asking itselfwhat bloated life can be, turningto the wall asking, what snow can be?

I have been a long time comingThe sun and the prince go on and on,pulling on each other, looking for a party,caught with their tails on fireor worse, fucking with a weaponless pigeon.Now I see devotion pulling and cover versionscascading to the pit of the archivewhere my hand is now, grubby Peyko-chic

Whatever drainage stinks down the wallI will still,Any flames can eat me upYou know —Delinquency forgets its echo YeaKaraoke was always sung across two seas

Fast Eddy

Or why, in the Dalston CLR JamesLibrary in the blonde agesthe enquiries could melt a man’sheart, or touch him, make a fool ofhim, or spread like bible enginesand really sorrowful. At that deskwe first knew the time I didn’t havethe cash on me, that was whenBig fence like might you broke.I thought you might be the shreddedwater beneath my hair, myEnlightened life. I thought thesteam room into Stevie Nicks’ headRevolving on Stevie Nicks’ neck.It’s not that I condone heraldry to getclose to death and coloursit’s that my feet are frequently misledvia Pontoon Dock or West Silvertownwhere I see an LED soul frazzle hanging& chicken bones rule the roostwhere sometimes it demeans us to where things leave usand where we leave things

alone, dancing onthe showboat, a glazed wooden brain.What’s not great about this is this:in the soft fruit brain, what’s binaryand what’s not *poverty under the sun*software that knows you and the twoof us asleep on Pluto where, if a porn imageever dumbs up, hits itself in the eyeneeds love phobia of love or stickies, I will be there to give it.So bad I need money, I hire out benignityI’m huh your syndicat d’initiative go bounce in the night Hug me —“tell me it’s okay not to be modern,”

that Louise Labe would’ve made believe Not found goat in her bednot sunk head-first into woolly Caracascalled her mum to say “call me.”

It’s not that I want a showy titleI just want to believe I saw the arrowsPointing to each hole in the skyyou’ve gone to buy me a birthday presentof voluminous capacity, Iknow where things leave us blown acrossthe window where the sound of train rollsor at night wake up: to me, my favouritetime was in the street, junky cussbut aside from this tenet what I see isbands of poems: hairspray-encrusted plenary powermy self-pity bawling with the local yoga babiesthat when I was too tepid was when my heart rubbleand my milk feet. Somebody! Coax down the decade pine away palinode stretch roving echo to Vancouver’s alacrity a shaky shoe-rack above Japan,the atmosphere’s an apple layer for usour opal loss my fresh apple:

Sarah Dowling and Amy De'Ath have curated this feature devoted to the influence of North American poetry and poetics on English poetry, with work by Tim Atkins, Jeff Hilson, Richard Parker, Holly Pester, Sophie Robinson, and Carol Watts that offers a range of perspectives on the intersections of Anglophone poetries.